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Message: <blockquote data-quote="cmbarona" data-source="post: 6011785" data-attributes="member: 71281">A comment that's sort-of tangential to the topic:I'm all for simplified healing, but I really hope they don't bring back  the Cure Light Wounds wand trick. I think over-reliance on magical  healing is a narrative trap. There's a great couple of paragraphs on page 13 of the 8/13/12 "How to Play" document about HP abstraction. It really frees up room for more dynamic storytelling when every swing of your axe doesn't have to mean an actual wound. Over the course of combat, combatants get bumps, scrapes, and cuts. They also suffer from exhaustion and fading morale. Sometimes quick reflexes and small divine favors are involved. It's hard to hold abstraction together with a magic-only based healing system that supposedly exists to cure extremely serious injuries.They already have Healer's Kits to address the general bumps, scrapes, and cuts of combat, and presumably, more serious wounds as well. I think they wanted to include these as a replacement of 4e's mechanic that allowed you to simply use as many healing surges as you wanted during a short rest without outside aid. I think this may have swung too far into the abstract nature of HP for some folks. Healer's Kits are a nice middle ground, I believe. Being at 1HP doesn't mean your lung fell out; you're just really banged up and fatigued, and you'll be fine after treating your wounds and catching your breath. [/rant]To bring this back to the topic at hand, I think Channel Divinity is actually meant to simplify healing, whether or not it accomplishes that task. Clerics get a baseline of healing as a class feature, and need not prepare specific healing spells if they don't want to. I suppose this could be handled by making Cure Wounds-type spells an automatic preparation, like Turn Undead currently is, and increasing the Cleric's available spells by one per current CD gain...I know there is a lot of potential overlap between Channel Divinity and a Cleric's spells. I suppose the question to ask is, what is the benefit of separating the two mechanics? One I can see right now is that you can do it while gagged and bound. Another is that they could cover some domain-specific abilities to avoid spell-list bloat. If only one class, and one subclass within that class, has this ability, why add it to the spell list? further, perhaps there are issues we don't see yet because the rules don't yet exist, such as possible interactions with spell-casting items (wands, scrolls, etc.), multiclassing, and a "Channel Divinity" line of features that needs to work across divine classes regardless of spell list.</blockquote>

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